Alon Confino

Alon Confino was born in 1959 in Jerusalem

Confino was born in Jerusalem and grew up in the Talbiya neighborhood. His father, Michael Confino, was a historian of modern Russia, and his mother, Hagar Sereni, was the daughter of Ada Sereni and Enzo Sereni. He was the youngest of 3 children.

He finished the Hebrew Gymnasium Rehavia in 1977 and then served in the army. He earned a BA in history at Tel Aviv University in 1985. He completed his MA and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992.

From 1992 to 2017 he taught history at the University of Virginia, and from 2013 to 2017 also at Ben-Gurion University. In 2018 he became a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he led its institute for Holocaust, genocide and memory studies. His research dealt with memory, culture and nationhood, starting from modern German history.

His book A World Without Jews, published in English in 2014 and in Hebrew in 2017, explained Nazi antisemitism through Nazi imagination and fantasy. Reviews of the book were mixed. In 2021 he co-organized and co-wrote the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism.

He was married to Francesca Fiorani, with whom he had 2 sons, and later to Tal Goldfajn. He died of leukemia on June 27, 2024.